justsit wrote:So do you believe everything you think? (addressed to OP)

that reminds me, padmasambhava stated that the meditator who believes his own mind will take the wrong path at the time of death.

If the thought of demons Never rises in your mind, You need not fear the demon hosts around you. It is most important to tame your mind within....

In so far as the Ultimate, or the true nature of being is concerned, there are neither buddhas or demons. He who frees himself from fear and hope, evil and virtue, will realize the insubstantial and groundless nature of confusion. Samsara will then appear as the mahamudra itself….

I find the most powerful experience of it meditation wise is with reference to self, each passing moment you have a thought, interpret sense data, etc. you have to do so in reference to a sense of self. For me, it's like an actual visual picture, and each time I follow the thought, sense object, etc. back to it and observe it has changed. I cannot observe it constantly, time is choppy for me.. and it can kind of dissolve just the way thoughts can when observed. But yeah, any time I view this self, it is different, it has never once repeated a form.

The same could be said of anything really, but with the this kind of self-picture, noticing it's impermanence is more jarring then things like thoughts and sense data, which are sort of intuitively impermanent.

May the eyes of living beings be gladdened by skies made splendid by clouds that lightnings garland, while on earth below, the peacocks dance with joy as showers of rain, falling gently, approach.

invisiblediamond wrote:In Vajrayana practice the meditation on impermanence is mostly about contemplating death, that everyone is subject to it. In Theravada, the meditation on impermanence takes the form of observing the arising and passing away of phenomena, which is internal.

The Theravadan approach makes sense to me, because it is direct subjective experience of arisings and decayings.

The Vajrayana approach makes less sense, because it is an act of conceptualization, storytelling. And engaging in stories for their metaphorical/instructional value is imo a slippery slope ... it's way too easy to reify the stories, mistake them for reality. (No disrespect intended for Vajrayana or any other form of Buddhism.)

Instead of telling stories, it's more like conditioning yourself thing think right..if that makes sense. Just like you would train yourself for a physical task, constant correction of your movements etc..it's similar. You fake it till it's real, that is why it is powerful.

You cannot see a rock change, but the very idea that you think it is the same rock is the problem, it has ceased to be the same rock the minute you start thinking about it, so all you are lacking is visual proof of change..which is obviously there both by inference and by empirical evidence, which we accept based on inference - lol.

"External change" is entirely 100% conjecture, you will never experience external change, and never have it - can only be inferred.

May the eyes of living beings be gladdened by skies made splendid by clouds that lightnings garland, while on earth below, the peacocks dance with joy as showers of rain, falling gently, approach.

Personally, I DO think what we experience is constantly changing. At least for me.

Take a blank wall. This is something that I am familiar with as a Zen student. Now we tend to think of the wall as solid. However, this is more what I think about the wall than what I experience. I CAN that my experience of the wall is constantly changing:

1. The experience wall comes and goes as I face toward it and away from it. At times, it fills my whole field of vision. At other times, it fills a small part of my vision. At other times, there is no wall there at all. The wall looks one way up close, and another way from afar.

2. The wall looks one way in the early morning, another way in the bright day, and another at night. A mere cloud outside can change the color of the wall.

3. The longer I stare at the wall, the less solid it appears. The colors tend to blur and become squiggly. Sometimes, the wall vanishes altogether.

So I don't see a contradiction.

The Great Way is not difficultIf only there is no picking or choosing--- Xin Xin Ming

Matt J wrote:Personally, I DO think what we experience is constantly changing. At least for me.

Take a blank wall. This is something that I am familiar with as a Zen student. Now we tend to think of the wall as solid. However, this is more what I think about the wall than what I experience. I CAN that my experience of the wall is constantly changing:

1. The experience wall comes and goes as I face toward it and away from it. At times, it fills my whole field of vision. At other times, it fills a small part of my vision. At other times, there is no wall there at all. The wall looks one way up close, and another way from afar.

2. The wall looks one way in the early morning, another way in the bright day, and another at night. A mere cloud outside can change the color of the wall.

3. The longer I stare at the wall, the less solid it appears. The colors tend to blur and become squiggly. Sometimes, the wall vanishes altogether.

So I don't see a contradiction.

These are all subjective changes, changes in the way your mind perceives/interprets the wall, not changes in the wall itself. And, as I said, I agree that you can experience annica of your mindstream.

So where is the line between the mind-stream and the wall? Does one ever experience the wall itself (i.e. beyond our seeing, hearing, touching, etc.)?

rachmiel wrote:These are all subjective changes, changes in the way your mind perceives/interprets the wall, not changes in the wall itself. And, as I said, I agree that you can experience annica of your mindstream.

The Great Way is not difficultIf only there is no picking or choosing--- Xin Xin Ming

rachmiel wrote:These are all subjective changes, changes in the way your mind perceives/interprets the wall, not changes in the wall itself. And, as I said, I agree that you can experience annica of your mindstream.

What you are actually seeing is light, which hits the wall and enters your eye. In fact, in order to appear a colour, the object must absorb all the other visible colours and the one you see is the one that bounces off.

In order to have a perception, there must be this contact, and that means it is changing. If it didn't change, you wouldn't see it.

we cannot get rid of God because we still believe in grammar - Nietzsche

rachmiel wrote:These are all subjective changes, changes in the way your mind perceives/interprets the wall, not changes in the wall itself. And, as I said, I agree that you can experience annica of your mindstream.

Matt J wrote:So where is the line between the mind-stream and the wall? Does one ever experience the wall itself (i.e. beyond our seeing, hearing, touching, etc.)?

No.

Here's my take, fwiw. (Not my attempt to paraphrase a Buddhist take.)

First, there is no "wall itself." There is *something* that exists which mind interprets as: wall. But that's just an interpretation of mind, a concept. So there is no wall-itself to be experienced.

If you move down to the *something* that does exist ... this something cannot be experienced other than through the senses, which is mind.

So: "The wall" is a kind of co-creation of mind and the something that does exist. Without mind there would be no wall; without the something there would be nothing for mind to interpret (as wall). You need both for the wall to come into (relative) being.

invisiblediamond wrote:But in Vajrayana one gets into the Buddha nature and the internal reality of the kayas. So meditation on anicca gets demoted big time.

Vajrayāna, Buddha nature and the kāyas do not contradict anitya or impermanence. So it's impossible that anitya is demoted. The three marks; anitya, anātman and duhkha, are an integral aspect of Vajrayāna and the other yānas.

There is no "wall itself". Or at least, there is no "wall itself" you will ever experience, that's an empty category. What would you experince, a bunch of atoms, solidity? It seems like this question comes down to what is subjective and what is objective ultimately, meditation wise it seems like the way to experience that is find whatever you believe delimits "inside" from "outside", and then observe it, try to find it's dimensions, and get to the bottom of it.

May the eyes of living beings be gladdened by skies made splendid by clouds that lightnings garland, while on earth below, the peacocks dance with joy as showers of rain, falling gently, approach.